Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today’s bike club ride was a visit to the Berlin Wall on Wilshire Blvd, across the street. It’s there because of the Wende Museum, and it’s the largest piece of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany.

This morning, I read that the city of Los Angeles had arranged for the original artist to come back and repaint the Micheltorena Stairs, after they had been painted over by unknown vandals a few weeks ago. So we decided that we’d also take the short side trip to see them on the way out to the Berlin Wall. The stairs look good, and apparently the city has arranged for them to treated with an anti-graffitti coating so that if they are vandalized again, it can be washed off easily.

We made it out to the Berlin Wall and took in the sight. We also saw that the main building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art across the street has been completely demolished. I’d heard that they were rebuilding it, but I didn’t realize that that meant it was going all the way to bare ground.

We went for snacks at the Curson Cafe in Park La Brea. We’ve been there before, and it’s nice sort-of-hidden place.

On the way back, we were about halfway back to downtown Los Angeles when I broke a spoke. Of course it was on the back wheel, and of course it was on the gear side. I took out my spoke wrench and managed to tune the wheel enough that it wasn’t dragging on the brake or the frame, and we continued on until we got downtown. Then I said ‘uncle’ and we got on Metro Rail to go back to Pasadena.

34 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

Back in 1998, I went to an airshow with some restored WWII bombers. Over the years, I went to see them a couple other times:

bombers in Burbank 2003

bombers in Burbank 2012

Each time, they offered rides in them, but was only this time that I decided to sign up for the ride.

The actual flight was only about a half-hour, and it was impossible to forget for even a second that we were flying in an actual antique airplane. These machines were built for a very specific purpose, and the comfort of the occupants was very low on the list. It was amazingly loud in there, even with some pretty serious earplugs. Once we were stably airborne, they let us get up out of our seats and walk around, with the important caveat to always, always be holding on to something. This airplane is really quite small by today’s standards, and it bounced up and down a good bit. We never got terribly high up. They said we had to be at least something like 2,000 feet above the ground, since we were flying over suburbia. I’ve been through that area many times on the freeway, but you just don’t get a sense of how many houses have been built all over the hills there. And any place that didn’t have houses on it, was obviously graded and set up to build streets and still more houses.

In any event, it was in interesting adventure, and I now have much more of an appreciation of what the guys who flew those planes during the war went through. Sure, when they were flying them, the planes weren’t antiques, but at the same time, they were being shot at, which is far, far worse.

I was watching an episode of “Lost L.A.” the other day about how the Crenshaw neighborhood was a mixed Black and Japanese area after the Japanese came back to Los Angeles after the war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9TyxQy57Q4

After seeing the part about Holiday Bowl, I figure that was going to have to be the Sunday bike ride for this weekend. So here we are. We rode out to Crenshaw to see the building that used to be Holiday Bowl.

45 miles.

Route map and elevation profile.

It’s been all over the news this week that this is the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. So it seemed appropriate that we should take a ride back to where it all started, as it were. So we rode over the Forest Lawn to see Rodney King.

Afterward, we rode over to Burbank and Priscilla’s for drinks and snacks.

46 miles.

Route map and elevation profile